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jp's Air Traffic Chaos (DS)
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| [May 24, 2022 06:12:20 PM]
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The games boxart makes it seem like the game is a wacky take on air traffic control in which "hijinks ensue" or something like that. It's actually a pretty serious/button down game - you're air traffic control and you must make sure your planes leave on time, land on time, have gates assigned to them and that planes don't spend too much time in a holding pattern and, more importantly don't crash into each other as they taxi around (or fly into each other).
I played the first airport on the 3 difficulty levels and - it's a surprisingly slow-paced game. You talk to the plan and authorize them to push back from the gate and you wait. There's a lot of waiting involved. This makes it hard to figure out the timing - will this plane take off in time before this other one needs to land? The tutorial explains all the different steps in the takeoff and landing process except for one...and this is the one that gave me the most trouble. When planes are coming in you can tell them to speed up or slow down (there are other options, like assigning a runway and clearing them to land). I never figured out what the speed up/slow down options were for. It wasn't clear to me if I was instructing planes to slow down to a certain speed (180 knots) or if to slow down by 180 knots. I have no idea how fast/slow a knot is in airspeed...also, when and why would I want a plane to speed up?
I only lost once - when two planes on the ground collided as one taxied to its gate and the other made its way to the runway to take off. Oops. But, like I said there can be a significant delay between an instruction/command and it being done - so it was hard to gauge when to start a new action from another plane and so on. Not complaining, just trying to justify the single accident!
What was most surprising is that the game has RUMBLE SUPPORT! I'd forgotten this was even a thing on the DS. Would only work on the older DS models - the ones with both a DS and a GBA cart slot. The rumble pack is essentially a GBA cart that goes into that slot, with the DS game in the DS slot. I think one of the pinball games used it? (Metroid Pinball perhaps? What a great game).
Anyways, that was a real surprise, since the game isn't Nintendo first-party, but rather a Majesco-published game. Also, the game supports up to 8 players in a multi cart setup (each player with their own cart). Wow! I wonder how that played? Do planes that take off on my game land in other players? Are we passing flights to each other? Is it a score chase? (boo, lame) The game's manual has zero information on this, which was a disappointment, but still...I'm intrigued. Not enough to buy 7 copies of the game and try to get 7 others to play...but hey. It makes you wonder why the feature was added in the first place?
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jp's Air Traffic Chaos (DS)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
GameLog started on: Monday 23 May, 2022
GameLog closed on: Thursday 2 June, 2022 |
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This is the only GameLog for Air Traffic Chaos. |
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